A. First, because the music is so incredible. But I think people got a little tired of seeing the same images with the same music. I wanted to make people listen to that score all over again. It was always the ballet I loved the most, but, as I watched it, I always felt there was another story in it.

MATTHEW BOURNE fears and hates birds, particularly the big ones, like swans, that threaten you when you walk near them.

But, the offbeat choreographer is a fair man. His particular brand of bird flu may be based on childhood prejudices, or repressed memories of a lakeside goose attack. So, as he contemplated a new staging of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet "Swan Lake," he went out to experience swans firsthand.

One of his notions was to cast men as the swans -- he said his fear of birds and his fondness for Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds" had prompted him to think about casting the swans as mean hombres, big, hulking critters who lost all their grace when they weren't swimming.

Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' hatches a new vision of the ballet that was just waiting to take flight

Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic

Friday, March 24, 2006

The Prince is having a very rough night. Slumped against a brick wall after a bout of heavy drinking and brawling at the Swank Bar, he senses something rustling out there in the dark. Wings, of all things -- swan wings. With that the scrim rises at the Orpheum Theatre, and the roiling, repressed emotion of Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" crests and bursts forth in wave after wave of sinewy, thunderous dance.

For the next 20 minutes or so, the miserable Prince is swept away and saved, stunned by the power of everything stirred up in him by this flock of stormy birds, especially one of them. The audience gets swept along with him. By evening's end it will have happened again and again -- in a ballroom and a bedroom and most of all in the realm of fresh, doomed love. Bourne's savagely beautiful, saucily funny and deeply unsettling version of the classic 19th century story ballet is a modern theatrical dance masterwork. The arrival of this celebrated 1995 work here is a long-overdue event, and it's feverish and sly and heart-wrenchingly sad.

Groan all you want, but Bourne's charming, and somewhat bizarre, gender-bending version of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet takes the often staid world of ballet to places, like a dive bar in London, emerging from a Bentley, and atop a giant bed with feathered creatures bent on killing each other.

In fact, all that remains of the original ballet is the music, exquisitely performed by a pit orchestra, conducted by Earl Stafford.

The rest comes from the delightfully skewed mind of Bourne, who remains true to the basic story of choosing love over duty, and paying the consequences. Here, however, the story sort of follows the tribulations of the British Royal Family, with some major exceptions.

Bourne completed the dance degree, became a modern dancer, and formed his first company, Adventures in Motion Pictures, in 1987. When he had the chance to produce a Swan Lake , he says, it felt “natural” because “I loved the music. I felt there was a story to tell in the music that hadn’t been told, my personal take on it, using all my love of cinema and theater. I didn’t feel I was the bad boy of ballet — I’m not even from the ballet.”

Bourne’s beefed-up ‘Swan Lake’ comes to townIt’s hard to believe 10 years have passed since Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” first took flight and ruffled feathers with its tale of a sexually frustrated prince and his fatal attraction to a flock of bare-chested men, rather than the traditional bevy of ballerinas. It’s even harder to believe this radical reinvention of the Tchaikovsky classic has never been seen in Boston. But “Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake” will finally touch down Thursday at the Colonial Theatre....

For the Contra costa Times, Pat Craig goes on and on about comparisons with the traditional ballet and ends with: "...perhaps the only opportunity you will have for belly laughs at the ballet."

The thing is Bourne is primarily a contemporary dance choreographer and his "Swan Lake", like his other full-length and short works, draw on a variety of sources. But ballet, in the usual sense of the word, it ain't, and doesn't claim to be.

There was a similar problem with the NY reviews of his "Play Without Words" ie more concerned with what it wasn't than what it was.

Pointe Man: Choreographer soars with boldly reinvented ‘Swan Lake’....But is Bourne’s version [of Swan Lake] truly a ballet? “Some people think a classical ballet is defined by pointe shoes and tutus,” said Bourne. “This isn’t really a ballet if that’s the image you have. This is a combination of many things, including classical movement, contemporary movement, mime, the style of dancing from musical theater and different forms of social dance.”

Technical problems clip wings of ‘Swan’Hundreds of people eager to see the Boston premiere of Matthew Bourne’s production of “Swan Lake” filed into the Colonial Theatre last night. Little did they know that less than an hour later, they would be back at the box office trying to get a refund or exchange for one of five remaining performances..... Colonial Theatre manager Chris Mahin ... [explained] that a problem with one of the sets might threaten the safety of the dancers ....

Correction to This ArticleToday's Weekend section, which was printed in advance, includes an article about Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" at the Warner Theatre. On April 20, the entire run of the show, scheduled to begin April 25, was canceled by the show's producers.

When Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" arrives at the Warner Theatre on Tuesday, it brings not a gaggle of tutu-clad ballerinas, but a flock of very athletic swans, every last one of them male. They don't shimmer and flit through the forest in satiny pink pointe shoes; Bourne's male swans gallop and hurtle, engulfing the stage with disarming visceral power. With most eyes trained to regard "Swan Lake" as a celebration of lithe, sylph-like ballerinas, these men, bare-chested and brawny, force us to take a second look when the male corps de ballet enters to the strains of Tchaikovsky's clarion swan call.

Inventive redux worth the wait.... when the house lights dimmed last night just past the scheduled 8 o’clock start, the audience breathed a collective sigh of relief - and the show that went on proved that Bourne’s 1995 choreography for this most classic of classical ballets is a bona fide masterpiece. While other choreographers attempt to make 19th-century ballets more relevant to modern audiences, Bourne’s effort here is practically unique in its unqualified success.

New ‘Swan Lake’ makes its point powerfullyIn his re-imagination of “Swan Lake,” for which the word “stunning” seems far too wimpy, Matthew Bourne makes it seem as if Peter Ilyich wrote the ballet for him. ....Then again, this is hardly classical ballet. It’s more like conversational ballet in which the dance and music are always in service to the story rather than the other way around, despite the fact that Bourne is choreographer as well as director.

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